Saturday, September 24, 2005

This afternoon I made an expedition to the main library, and when I got to Charlottesville I discovered to my chagrin that the downtown area was clogged with traffic. A big banner hanging across Market Street informed me that the Charlottesville Vegetarian Festival was celebrating a healthy lifestyle for the ninth straight year, and as I fought to find a parking place I saw that Lee Park and the surrounding streets were filled with festival-goers.

After coming out of the library with my books, curiosity drove me across Second Street to take a look at the festival. As a Pajamas Media correspondent with the interests of the blogosphere in mind, I went into deep cover (by putting my copy of Mona Charen’s Do-Gooders between two of Alexander McCall Smith’s books to make it less conspicuous) and strolled into the park to look at the booths and scope out the vegetarians. Unfortunately, I had not brought a camera to town, and thus am unable to provide you with any photographic record.

As Dymphna has often said, Charlottesville is “Berkeley East,” so the denim-and-granola crowd was out in force, with healthy-looking vegan women mixing freely with animal-rights activists, organic farmers, peace-‘n’-justice radicals, and assorted feminists, with regular SPCA-types and healthy-living promoters to leaven the mix. I walked among the booths and tables, enjoying the people, the colorful signs, and the mild September air.

I had to know more, so I started looking through their literature. The woman running the table noticed my interest, and helpfully pointed out the more informative pamphlets, encouraging me by telling me that they were free.

I came away with several interesting tracts (and paid $1.50 for the bumper sticker so I could display it here).

The lengthiest of my acquisitions is a pamphlet entitled “The Primitivist Primer.” It outlines a manifesto for an anti-industrial political philosophy:

What is anarcho-primitivism?

…At best, then, anarcho-primitivism is a convenient label used to characterize diverse individuals with a common project: the abolition of all power relations — e.g., structures of control, coercive authority, domination and exploitation — and the creation of a form of community that excludes all such relations.

O.K, so far, so good — we’re not going to coerce and dominate and exploit anybody any more. That will be nice. Of course, we also won’t coerce anyone into non-dominating non-exploiting behavior, either. Hmm…

Anarcho-primitivism is an anti-systemic current: it opposes all systems, institutions, abstractions, the artificial, the synthetic, and the machine, because they all embody power relations (as well as domination and destruction of nature). Anarcho-primitivists thus oppose technology and the technological system, but not the use of tools and implements (that would be absurd!) in the sense as indicated here.

Presumably the tools and implements will all be made of stone and wood and bone, because otherwise we would have to do some destructive smelting and smithing.

They envision a future that is “radically cooperative and communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and wild.” A primitivist society would be decentralized, egalitarian, and self-sufficient…

I can dig it. I’m ready to hang out at the all-organic non-industrial commune and truly align myself with the earth.

But there is the thorny problem — after we junk all the John Deere harvesters and grain elevators and nasty steel mills — of how to feed the five billion souls under Mother Gaia’s care. But don’t worry; the Coalition Against Civilization has taken this into consideration:

What about population?

Anarchists have long argued that in a free world, social, economic, and psychological pressures towards excessive reproduction would be removed. There would just be too many other interesting things going on to engage people’s time! Feminist primitivists have argued that women, freed of gender constraints and the family structure, would not be defined by their reproductive capabilities as in patriarchal societies, and this would result in lowered population levels too. So population would be likely to fall, willy-nilly.

So that’s how it will work: feminist primitivists will have control over their reproductive lives. And they will do so, presumably, without birth-control pills, diaphragms, condoms, etc., because industrial technology is required to make those luxuries. One assumes that anarcho-primitivist guys will just have to do without.

I also brought home this flyer:

SPECIES TRAITOR

Species traitor exists as a forum for spreading and developing theories and practical means to bring about the destruction of civilization and defend what wilderness remains. We feel that now more than ever, there is a need for a viable alternative to the mass death culture, and hope to widen the range of information available.

This cannot be clear enough, we embrace the goal of moving beyond civilization and will not settle for reform on any level.

Now we’re entering Unabomber territory: direct action, sabotage, radical destruction, etc. As a matter of fact, the Primitivist Primer lists the Unabomber’s Manifesto as recommended reading. In case you were wondering, these people really mean business.

So what do they want? Obviously, the elimination of technological society, the end of all political structures, and a return to a primitive agriculturally-based society. That’s quite an ambitious project.

How many people could the earth support under such a neo-Neolithic model? Ten million? A hundred million? Let’s be generous and say a billion. That means that four-fifths of the world’s population would have to disappear.

I don’t think herbal contraceptives and the rhythm method are going to do the job. And I think the leaders of these movements know it, even if they don’t dare say so in their pamphlets. To achieve their ideal society, to create their heaven on earth, four billion people will have to die. Who do you think those people will be? And who do you think will get to choose who goes, and who gets to stay? Somehow, I don’t think the Anarcho-primitivists and the Greens and the Gaia-worshipping feminists are going to volunteer to lay down their lives for the good of the Collective.

You’re on a bus with nine other people. Look around you: eight people have to die. Who will they be? The guy with the ponytail and the “Think Globally, Act Locally” T-shirt and his girlfriend with the flowered mumu? They don’t think they’ll be the ones to go. No, it will be you and all the other bozos on that bus.

When the time comes, when the Untelevised Revolution finally seizes the levers of power, it will be the Central Committee of the Anarcho-Green People’s Coalition that makes the decisions. The workers and bureaucrats and truck drivers and school children won’t just lie down in the streets to die. No, it will be Pol Pot all over again, only done righteously this time.

We know the drill; we’ve seen it so many times before. The Enemies of the People will be marched out of the cities and herded into camps to work for the common good. Those who can’t handle it, who can’t reconcile themselves to the new order will… Well, they’ll just have to be sacrificed.

They’ll go in single file across the organic soybean fields to the mass graves that have been so thoughtfully prepared for them.

And you can bet that the bulldozer and the pistol will be the last technological artifacts to be given up after the Green Millenium arrives.

Update: Welcome, readers from LGF and Belmont Club! Glad to have some lizardoids here.

Just a reminder, in case you didn’t see it elsewhere: I have scanned the entire pamphlet, A Primitivist Primer, so that the primary document can be available for anyone interested. The reading list is really fascinating: the Unabomber appears twice, along with Che Guevara and lots of violent anarchists.

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comments:

Bless you for this, Baron. I would recommend you take a look at this link as well, if you are interested in meeting Mr. Kurtz himself. I will paste this riposte he has conveniently provided for your comments:

http://www.blackandgreen.org/kt.html

I have said: "the only thing 6 billion people can do is die." I wasn't lying either. 6 billion people is way past the earth's carrying capacity, but population is the effect not the cause of our situation. I don't believe in enforcing any kind of system, much less one that would be that authoritarian and invasive. Honestly, if we take out civilization, the population problem will fix itself in due time.

one more thing. Re: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves - check out the lupine visage of this great thinker on the page I just linked. Can we make this any more clear?? If you can't see what this guy is up to, you have to be blind, deaf, and dumb...

Sane people would look dangerous lunatics like these in dungeons someplace and throw away the key, (before they can do the same to us), or dump them in the Amazon someplace or on an island without any of that nasty, industrially made camping or survival gear so they could live as one with nature. Alas, we're too (in)sane for any of that.

Ah, distraction by village festivals, and fatigue from gathering berries, as effective contraceptives. Now THAT will work. Wolf Guy has not just a Shadow Power-Instinct that would choke Napoleon, but serious failure of imagination.

Your chilling follow-thru of the implications and associations of the theory is clear-eyed. The destruction of real thought by the education system has created raging susceptibility to unexamined demagoguery. Thus the fabled radicalism of youth can ever more easily be harnessed by picturesque idiocies.

On a lighter note, I'm in love with your Charen-McCall Smith sandwich. Your library is well-stocked (and perhaps there's little competition for good reading, as I found in the cavernous D.C. library years ago).

El Tejon -- not only were they mass-produced, but the bumper sticker is a slick capitalist-production item, with a (gasp!) plastic coating.

It was amusing to see the trash from the vegetarian-food stalls: styrofoam containers, plastic forks, salt packets, etc., and all being dumped into the trash cans. The recycling bins were for plastic bottles only, so that all the Dannon Natural Spring Water bottles went in there, but everything else made the long haul out to the landfill.

These people always seem to forget that in about 5 billion years, the sun as we know it will begin to die. As it does, it will sterilize the earth of bunnies, flowers and any evil reminants of man. There is no eternal eden on Earth living as primitives.

Mezzrow -- actually, the pamphlet lists blackandgreen.org, and also greenanarchy.org, as well as coalitionagainstcivilization.org. I was reluctant to send more traffic their way than necessary, so I didn't give them all links. But... know your enemy.

Did you see the burning bridge on the Coalition Against Civilization site?

You watch: these people will make common cause with the mujahideen. First they gain power, then they can fight with each other about which people have to die.

A former collegue told this story about being an obnoxious teenager going through an obnoxious teenaged phase where she decided to be a vegetarian. Her dad sat her down and told her this story:

In the old days, man ate nuts and berries, and man constantly was on the move, looking for food to fill his hungry belly. Then one day, man ate meat. And on that day, he finally sat down, because for once his belly was full.

A cute story. What is somehow more appropriate is the actual history of the prehistoric human race. Up until about 10,000 years ago, man was a hunter-gatherer. The assumption always seems to be that he survived on the gathering part, while getting the occasional treat of meat when the tribe succeeded in bringing down some food. In fact, those that do mineral analysis of prehistoric bones tell us that our caveman and cavewomen and cavechildren ancestors ate a diet that was about 90% meat.

Then about 10,000 years ago we discovered how to brew beer. This was a huge improvement to our health, because alcohol is a powerful water purification chemical, and so drinking beer, and then later wine, gave us a source of water that was safe to drink. Before that the only source of safe water would have been broths.

So when we started brewing beer, then we started cultivating grain crops to make the beer. And pretty soon we invented bread, which became a staple of our diets that crowded out a lot of meat. We had to create significant property rights -- before this people owned what they carried with them, and so stealing was hard. Once we had lots of real property, we invented war as ways to seize other people's property. And quickly discovered that fighting was a way that you could subjegate others. Women and children were significantly more disadvantaged in the new order -- as hunters they were a far more equal members of the tribe, now they became property. The planting of crops destroyed animal habitat, and the crops had to be protected from the animals tromping through them, so the animals were fenced away from people's property, or they were domesticated. Meat became more valuable, and so access to meat became something that the rich had and their slaves mostly ate bread.

In other words, all of those evil things that the vegetarians are complaining about came about as the direct result of human beings adopting a vegetarian diet. :-)

Wretchard has picked up your post. Congratulations you have given these wackos more publicity in pleasant Sunday afternoon than they could ever hope to get. Good work these are the type of things that spread their poison when no one is looking.

I hope you went to McDonalds or a similar place just to put it in the organizers face.

Cathyf

When I had survival training in the military they pointed out that with one or two exception any animal can be eaten if the meat looks healthy and you know what killed it. The exceptions can be eaten if you cook them.

Less than 1% of plants can be eaten, most of them require cooking. Many are poisonous.

If in doubt, eat meat.

Until organized agriculture provided a steady supply of known agricultural foodstuffs vegetarianism was a form of suicide.

" If they had to go vegan in their environment, they would surely die."---I was impressed by how many calories GWB burns off on his little excercycle.Anybody know how many Lance has to consume when he's racing?

Hank -- actually, after I left the festival I went to the veggie market to stock up on good apples & oatmeal!

BUT... then I went to Harris Teeter and ate lots of free samples of swiss cheese and processed meat while the lady thin-sliced my rare roast beef. Also bought a roast chicken and wine, in case you're interested...

cathyf said,"The planting of crops destroyed animal habitat, and the crops had to be protected from the animals tromping through them, so the animals were fenced away from people's property, or they were domesticated"---We used to have people come down the road and lecture us about the fence around "our" Apple Orchard/Garden."our" is the correct term, since they convinced me that it was not in fact "ours" thus we should not have a fence.And thus Whirled Peas was Achieved.

Also, Hank -- I heard that the Special Forces guys are trained to eat any dead animal, no matter how rotten. They just have to boil it a long enough time. It still tastes horrible, but it will sustain them.

Here:"Anarcho-primitivism is an anti-systemic current: it opposes all systems, institutions, abstractions, the artificial, the synthetic, and the machine, because they all embody power relations (as well as domination and destruction of nature)."

Um, no.

Systems are everywhere. Reality is a system of systems.

Now, one can choose to destroy, or corrupt, or ruin a system, but what will be left is...wait for it...another system.

Whether fern, paramecium, mitchondrion, elk, human, star, river, computer, building, trash dump, car, all of these are systems that require energy to be maintained, some are more adaptable than others, but no amount of primitivism or anarchy can do away with all systems.

This is not just madness or folly on their part, it is also a call for mass death, even murder, on a heretofore unimaginable level.

The good news is that these morons, themselves, cannot adapt and their system will, of course, soon collapse.

What makes machines evil and simple knives made out of stone (using one's hands) good? Only difference between those two is that the person who wrote this article is too dumb to understand how machines are made, and therefore wants everything beyond his comprehension destroyed. the same people who invented the knife, invented later on the machines - and the purpose is the same - so human beings can prosper and enjoy their lives on this planet. No person who wants to murder 4 billion people should be reasoned with - it is a person that should be shot in the head withuot a moment of hasitation. Did this person ever worked the land a day in his life? Or did he just marched to the nearest "albertsons" to buy his bread? And when he gets the chance he's going to slaughter the very same person who fed him. so Tell me: who is the evil one, who is the exployter here, that deserves death, by the very own writer's standarts?

Of course they’re a bunch of fools, hilarious so. But one has to wonder why they don’t just go out and do as they preach? There must be forests in America and Canada where they can leave civilisation behind and live as they supposedly dream of. The Amish has lived a life with scaled down technology for more than a hundred years. The truth is of course, mostly it’s just a game and as for the rest, for these liberal revolution romancing guys, they’ll never be content to live as they preach unless they also can force you and me and everybody else to do as they want too.

Manufactured flintstone blades. Every farmer in Denmark has his own collection. Supposedly they’re as sharp as the best of surgical knives. Also there was a whole industry based around the production of flintstone blades in Europe. Specialisation, division of labour, trade, price setting, the lot. Surely the primitivists wouldn’t allow that. So they’ll have to regress beyond the late stone age.

**** At heart I'm an anarcho-primitive. I despise the consumerism, the gluttony, the excess of today's United States.

BUT.... I much rather live here than in most other nations. Being poor in the 3rd world is the pits. These 3rd world nations are chaotic and polluted, with no anarcho primitives to be found.

Another problem with a USA that goes anarcho primitive is that China and other powerful nations will quickly takeover and exploit our resources. We will become a colony. We will become like any other hell hole of a 3rd world nation. Anarcho primitivism is UNSUSTAINABLE in today's world.

History is full of the more technologically advanced conquering the less advanced.

Thor Heyerdahl wrote "Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day: Memories and Journeys of a Lifetime"

He and his wife decided to get back to nature on an sparsely settled island. It starts off well then turns into disaster. Their anarcho primitive ideas bite the dust. There is no "peace" on that island as conflicts begin over sex money power.

The irony is that absent any rules, people with the real ability to hunt, fish, grow food and the will to murder people like those hippies milling around my bunker would rule the world. Not the fanny-lancers in their tie-dyed shirts.

In effect we are just as stupid as they are for different reasons. The beauty of it is that we are getting what we deserve.

In a sense they are exactly correct: do not screw with mother nature.

They are also correct about thoughtless power. The powerful deny them their needs due to lack of understanding. The reaction is inevitable.

As we learn more about brain chemistry the barbarity of it all will one day seem obvious.

The same impulses were evident in the genesis of alcohol prohibition.

What we are learning from the study of mental conditions and their relationship to drugs is that there may be no such thing as rereational use.

Drug use is just self treatment for undiagnosed conditions.

The lack of diagnosis is a symptom of the weakness of medical science.

The study of the history of fibromyalgia is instructive.

It was thought that folks with this problem were opiate "addicts". Until the underlying cause was discovered.

I'd bet that the same is true of all those we designate as "addicts".

As I said. You can't fool mother nature. If you try to the results for all concerned will be unfortunate.

The prejudice against drug users is a weakness of the majority who do not need them. We blame the drugs instead of looking deeper. Of course as we get more understanding of how all this works the prohibitionists will one day be deeply ashamed of their thoughtlessness and their unChristian behavior. We are about three to five years from that day given the current rate of advance in medical research in the area.

I have been fortunate in being able to tease out the root causes from very few data points. As more data points are added it will become obvious to the meanest intelligence.

Such finding will do great harm to the Republican cause. Which worries me greatly. Which is why I tend to rant on the issue at every opportunity. A monomania of sorts.

The outlines of my thesis came to me three years ago. Since then all research I have seen only provides further confirmation.

Dennis Peron who led the Prop. 215 effort (legalizing med pot in Calif) once said all use is medical use. I thought at the time ('97 I believe) that he was being flip.

No longer.

Science vs. prejudice is always a hard sell.

Once most people get past a certain age changing belief is very difficult.

I am fortunate at 61 to still have a supple mind capable (with effort) of jetisoning false beliefs. I gave up communism/socialism in my 30s. Most folks of my cohort could not do it. Which is why you see so many aging hippies at the "peace" demos.

For most folks belief patterns are fixed by the mid 20s. Which is why it often takes several generations for new ideas to affect the social order.

I came in late on this one - what a doozey! These vegian primitives would rue the day such a collapse actually occured because there would still be an abundance of arms and ammunition available for the natural predatory instincts of the species. What lovely prey these vegians would be! Can't you just imagine some of the clan/tribal folks that would develop in a collapse, and can't you just imagine them going to a vegian commune to barter? HA!HA! Some folks I know would probably eat their children - spit em' and roast em' alive.

I read a book a couple of years ago where anarcho-primitives tried to take over the world. The book ended in the Amazon jungle where the good guys made the primitives take off all their clothes and go into the jungle. The primitives exclaimed that they would surely die! The good guys answered... yes.In answer to how to reduce the population under the primitive's scenario, I can't help but think that the major source of reduction would come from women and children dying in childbirth. That is one way to cull the herd.

I think these lefties have finally gotten in touch with their own inner child, and it's spoiled-rotten and evil: they want everyone to die who isn't under their control (who is to enforce "anarcho-primitivism" and how?), and they don't want to keep very many of those, either.

Join us and rule the world! Keep the subjects technologically deficient enough to make it happen! Death, death, death! Sounds a lot like the environmentalists who cackle with delight at Americans paying through the nose for everything, on the grounds that the fewer people the better...

What ails the primitavists, Marxists, and whatever other 'ist' one can think up is they all swallowed Rousseau hook line & sinker. People being duped by the "state of nature" has caused so much misery and harm.

When the "Ecology Movement" first surfaced in the late 60's the "logical extentionists", people who are unable to live in an intellectually ambiguous world, immediately took this all the way and formed Ecology Action. Which was immediately taken over by political radicals who kicked all the dreamy eyed hippies out.

They saw the potential in "Eeek Ak" to recruit people who recoiled from the Trots and hard left Marxists. Beyond the withering away of the state they sold the withering away of everything.

These groups, the Eco Radicals, broaden the activist base and get more people into the streets. They also provide some of the most violence prone movement actors. An eco group, Earth Action, is a real domestic terorrist organization.

It is believed by the hard left that when The Revolution comes these groups will provide the initial shock troops to keep "The Man" off their back long enough for "The People" to get organized enough to stage an Octoberist coup.

The Whole Earth Catalog was the early movements bible and still is.

Studying, and running networks, in the fringes of the American Left is like going to the zoo every day. There's always something new, bizzare and interesting to see.

Buck Rutt.. Reindeer Injures Old Couple in Finland .The buck butted the man to the ground and kicked him before turning on the woman who was talking to her son on a mobile phone, Kittila fire chief Jorma Ojala said. The son alerted rescue workers who arrived in helicopters and flew the couple to hospital.. Was this Rudolf bin Laden, or just Arkasas Trailer Park Harem Scarem?A researcher at the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute said the attack came during the peak rutting season when up to 30 female reindeer may be on heat in the territory of one buck."Every year in the rutting season, buck reindeer are very possessive about their harems," said Mauri Nieminen, a reindeer expert at the institute. "If a person goes into an area between the reindeer and his females, the buck can easily turn on him or her."

Thanks for that Baron!Not sure if anybody is familiar with the story of Eustace Conway, but he's lived about as close to what the greenies would consider a "Utopian" life as anybody still alive today that I have read about. The book is called The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's a good read--to me it is an honest experiment in what is TRULY involved with getting back to nature; which is why so many idealistic and naive self-proclaimed earth firster types have left his mentorship in tears.

It has always irritated me that conservationists are merely a special-interest group -- and an increasingly eccentric one at that -- and yet hide behind the infuriating term "public interest." The extent to which a movement originally devoted to rolling back dirty air and water and maintaining the national parks has become increasingly hostile to human interests as humans choose to define them is disturbing.

i note that many of these fine eco-anarchists wear high-correction eyeglasses. i further note that they might, after they lose their glasses in a nature walk mishap, have trouble merely finding food to sustain their existence when the TECHNOLOGY they wish to abolish is gone.

to the anarchists: i understand your frustration - i really do. but be careful what you wish for. you might lose more than you are willing to give up - wifes, sons, daughters, friends, pets, etc.

the earth is a nasty place if you're not prepared.http://www.perc.org/publications/articles/Crichtonspeech.php

"I told you, we don't 'ave a lord, we're an anarcho-[primitivist] commune! -we take it in turns to act as a sort of an executive of the day..." It's a bleed'in Monty Python skit! And if they had their way, we'd be digging muck just like 'Dennis'. :)

I know; I said I was being generous. I've read quotes (but I can't remember where) from the extreme revolutionary Green terrorists saying a worldwide human population of about 100,000 is the sustainable level.

And none of these people will say how such goals are to be accomplished, not publicly. But we can make educated guesses...

For example, I can imagine eco-terrorists doing their best to get formerly Soviet supplies of smallpox. Just an idea...

All these eco-terrorists, greenies and militant vegans, who believe that we need to kill ourselves, shun technology and stop eating meat to help the environment, should lead by example, stop eating meat, move into the bush and kill themselves.

This sort of thought has been going for a long time among intellectuals. E.g., almost all fascist movements have a lot of anti-modernism in them. See "Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies"by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1594200084).

100,000 is too low. 100 million, on the other hand, is too high. At the time of the Roman Empire the population of the planet was probably around 150 million, and that's with a whole lot of supporting technology. Aqueducts and sewers, roads and harbours, lighthouses and libraries...

10 million, at a guess. So they want to kill 998 people out of every thousand. Lovely.

diverse individuals with a common project: the abolition of all power relations — e.g., structures of control, coercive authority, domination and exploitation — and the creation of a form of community that excludes all such relations.

Anarcho-primitivists thus oppose technology and the technological system, but not the use of tools and implements

I can't think of a FASTER way to increase the amount of control, coercion, and domination in the world than to get rid of technology, tools, and implements. Who wins if you get rid of technology? The bruiseboy with the biggest muscles. No more 9mm equalizers when a bigger guy wants your mate or your bananas. Think the cavemen lived in harmony with nature, with no coercion or domination? Uh uh. These idiots need to go watch a tribe of chimps or baboons for a while, and see if there is any coercion or domination in that situation. I can assure you they are not harmonious vegetarian pacifists! And that's basically humanity, without the tools.

I know I am a bit late coming into this, but I have my own ideas about what I would have done at this vegan event. I would have politely listened to their schpeal, accepted their literature for later reading and reasearch, and then said, in a very calm voice "By the way, I love humanity, I love science and technology, and I love the vast division of labor capitalism gives us, allowing billions of people from all over the globe to work towards their mutual self-interest, giving us an unprecedented standard of living. I also disbelieve all of the doomsday stories told by environmentalists. So I can say with all my heart, for the good of all humanity, that I hope you eat **** and die."

Of course, there is also this: if I had revealed my true feelings, I might have been surrounded by an angry mob of vegans and beaten to death with cauliflowers. And the blogosphere would have been left in woeful ignorance of the truth.

Ok, so, be prepared to run like hell.You are probably right about their reactions. For all their pretentions of peace-loving, some of these leftie nuts are prone to explode with anger and violence at the least hint that you have an opinion that differs from theirs, and can support it with a reasoned argument.

When confronted with this sort of thing, I have two zinger questions that never fails to crash their brains.

The first, usually fired off as a riposte to any "there are too many people" kind of statement: Who would you propose to eliminate first?

The second is a bit more oblique. I ask if they think Hitler or Stalin were evil. If they say "Yes", then I ask, on what POSSIBLE grounds? That hundreds of millions died? How does that differ from this outside of the logistical details?

Wow, Charlottesville must have gone loopy in the 10 years since I visited them. And I live in Northern Va., so close, yet so far away in many different ways!

Everytime I read these destructive eco-fantasies of the Left and what they have planned for us on the libertarian Right, I'm always reminded of that 1990s clandestine publication, "The Resister," and one quote that has stuck with me. It always seems apropro for these lethal environmentalist desires:

here is the irony of primitivism, many times its proponents have academic and urban origins. There is little in their history concerning rural living and survival tactics. Shop at whole foods, drive a subaru and neglect the fact that the people who truly understand what is takes to survive off the land find it laugable that crazy whites from Portland would call themselves "DeerStar".I grew up in a community that resembles a third world shanty town. One of the only sources of income was a sawmill that employed over 40 people in the community. Then along came the environmentalists, who procliamed that we were harming nature and destroying the forest. After months of imbittered legal battles, it was the greens that came away looking like fools when they neglected to see "the people amongst the trees", whose ancestors had taken care of the land for the last 500 years. OOPS!My point is this: there is no coincidence that many primitivists, greens and ecoterrorists have urban origins.

You're right about the cosseted environment most of these people live in. Probably quite a few of the Charlottesville ones live out in Nelson or Greene Counties where they can play out their Rousseau fantasies, have cheap property taxes, and still commute to their office jobs in C'ville.

We know who would be the first to crumple if the "primitive" conditions ever really arrived, don't we? But the Greens don't ever really expect that -- if they gain power, I'm sure they'll institute their own all-natural gulag, where the slave labor of the unenlightened will support their Green masters in their accustomed organic style.

In reading Primitivist rhetoric I am often times reminded of a quote that appeared in the movie "Weather Underground" in which Mark Rudd states that the idealism of the back-to-the-land hippies was met with disaster because "All we ever knew about nature was from Disney movies". Their misguided attempts at going back-to-the-land were confronted with obstacles such as crop loss, disease and inability to fulfill basic needs. Yet those that did endure raised children that grew up in a bonafide community, an experience that many people will never know.There is a facet of life that cannot be understood unless one has existed in a land based culture for an extended period of time.Although well intentioned, Primitivist would be advised that "walking the walk" is much more important that the "talk".

Numerous countries (Ethiopia and India, to name a few) have experienced famine while in the process of exporting useless items (flowers, dog food) to other countries. This is not a sustainable system.

There ARE too many people to feed, and when oil runs out, or god knows what else happens, we're going to have a big problem.

This, of course, is focusing on people alone. Nevermind the fact that it's predicted that within 100 years, 1/2 of ALL species will be extinct.

Most people in the world don't have access to the medicine you're talking about. Most people don't have access to the products they're making to be exported. They do have land they could use from themselves. And by "most people," I mean non-white, poor people.

So the question Anarcho Primitivists pose, isn't wacko. The question is: "do we wait for the system to destroy itself, and most of us, or do we take it down before things grow worse?"

And don't get me started on pointing out the hypocrisy of mass-produced pamphlets.

I think anarcho-primitivism has the ability to reach it's utopian potential in parallel with mainstream society, ex. the 'wildernesses' of Canada in The US. Destroying capitalist consumer cultures is the end, but the means is not forcing people into a lifestyle, but by creating a viable alternative. "Dropping out" of the system, living "off the grid" if you will, which is a perspective which even many libertarians may find appealing.

Let's hope people adopt (and are willing to defend) the alternative before the status quo of global capitalism destroys the possibility.

Will, have you spent any time at all in the wilderness in Canada? Without at the very least stone-age technology, survival in the Canadian wilderness is utterly impossible. With stone age (i.e. native) tech, the average total lifespan was less than 30 years - and they knew what they were doing! Do you think you could survive even one day in 40 below temperatures?

Surely the anarchists know that the worst possible situation for the sake of nature and natural resources would be the dissolution of what passes for civilization these days. The most underdeveloped and technologically forlorn nations are precisely those with the most abysmal environmental conditions that accompany poor health, poverty, and crime. The societies that are most advanced provide the best hope for achieving a sustainable balance between "us" and the rest of the planet's biota-- two realms that some seem to think are separate and not interdependent. For better or worse this means increasingly large urban centers.

An obvious corollary is that only in advanced societies do people have the luxury of time and energy to think up the right problems to attack, let alone solutions for the benefit of billions of souls.

The current system-- and of course there is no getting away from systems-- is, according to a mountain of both doomsday data and hype, headed for trouble due to our ravenous exploitation of non-sustainable resources. It seems rational to acknowledge that there is a significant, if unknowable, degree of truth in these prognostications. The 'solution' may not be technological so much as in our ability to endure the effects of forces that we have little or no control over.

We have always persevered against natural or "man-made" calamities because we turn to one another, not on one another.